


Minimal Pair

by sabinelagrande



Category: MythBusters
Genre: Alternate Universe - Academia, Gen, Languages and Linguistics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-15
Updated: 2010-10-15
Packaged: 2017-10-12 18:06:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/127611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabinelagrande/pseuds/sabinelagrande
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jamie can barely keep everyone organized as it is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Minimal Pair

The office space isn't that big; they have the fifth floor of Montgomery Hall and a piece of the seventh, which Jamie is still fighting with the English department over. He's aware that they don't make particularly good neighbors, what with the way they go around muttering to themselves and practicing implosives in the hallways and snickering whenever someone says "fourth floor," but Jamie can barely keep everyone organized as it is.

The TA office is up on the seventh floor, where they can't bother him too much. The office door is covered with aluminum foil at the moment; Kari and Grant made the mistake of leaving for a conference without Tory, who proceeded to get bored and wrap everything in the office in the stuff. It's better than last semester's silly string war, or the water balloons at the last department picnic, so Jamie's letting this one slide. The truth is, Jamie puts up with all of it because of their work, the way they get when they finally get serious, lost in their research for hours at a time.

Tory builds his elaborate syntactic models, scrawling elegantly across the whiteboards in his shared office, outlined in spiky circles and variants on Do Not Erase; he and Grant are building a grand theory of everything, told in erasures and gaps and notes scribbled to each other. Kari sketches arcane symbols along the edges when she gets bored, next to Peircean triangles that go on forever, popping through the empty nodes of Tory's trees, until they finally run out of space.

It's kind of beautiful, actually.

Jamie's office is on the fifth floor, behind the department secretary's desk, on the left hand side. To his right is Adam, whose office is an utter catastrophe. Jamie's been trying to kick him out of it more or less since Adam got here, but it's the only place with room for _Adam's_ secretary, and since Adam brings in pretty much all their external funding, well.

Everybody likes experimental linguistics.

Jamie's standing in the doorway to Adam's office, mentally making a list of minimal pairs in Russian to give to the 101 students and getting steadily more annoyed. They're going to be late to the methods class that Jamie's somehow been roped into co-teaching, but Adam doesn't seem to care. He's talking excitedly to someone on the phone; if he says "like" or "dude" on more time, Jamie's going to start recording him for his lecture on age grading.

Jamie clears his throat, and Adam looks up, startled. "Look, man, I've gotta go," he says, his eyes on Jamie. "Yeah, no, totally. Yeah. Take care." He hangs up the phone. "Yasha," Adam greets him.

Jamie purses his lips. "Nobody calls me that."

"It's right, though, isn't it?" he asks, and he actually looks a little concerned. "I looked it up on my iPhone just a second ago."

"We're gonna be late," Jamie reminds him.

"What are we waiting for?" Adam says, picking up his iPad and sliding it into his bag. He gets up, hopping over a stack of journals on his way to the door; Jamie steps out of the way to let him lock it. "So hey," he says, shoving his keys into his pocket, "did you read that article in _Language_ about _ass_ camouflage?"

Jamie frowns. "You're making that up."

"No, seriously!" Adam tells him, waving at the secretary on his way out. "We should totally test it!"


End file.
